Once in a while  every five years or so, if we are very lucky  a show
comes along which incites a critic to abandon even any pretence at chin-stroking
contemplation and simply pant enthusiastically, "Rush now to see this glorious
piece of work". Such a moment was the appearance in London last year of
Shockheaded
Peter. And now it is back, and we can all rush to see it again.

This is Phelim McDermott and Julian Crouch's gleefully grotesque adaptation
of Heinrich Hoffmann's 19th-century Struwwelpeter cautionary tales
for children, in which Harriet burns to death when she plays with matches,
Conrad Suck-a-Thumb bleeds to death when the Scissor Man removes the offending
digits, Fidgety Philip impales himself on the family's best cutlery and
so forth. The tales are woven together by a semi-narrative in which a couple,
horrified when the stork brings them a straw-haired, long-nailed baby,
hide it under the floorboards and are haunted both physically and psychologically
by the neglected child.

It hardly sounds a laugh a minute, but the production's rich broth of
grand
Guignol, puppetry, trompe l'il Victorian toy theatre design
and an infectious delight in the artifice of the whole process combine
to create 90 continuous minutes of bizarre, unholy fun  the kind of show
that will make earnest parents blanch even as their children revel in the
gore and grotesquerie. The tone is set by the first appearance of Julian
Bleach's magnificently comic-chilling master of ceremonies, a close cousin
to the Child Catcher of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang: "Ladies... and
gentlemen," he announces with utmost floridity, and then, as a reluctant
afterthought, adds, "...boys and girls," rather as if the odour of a three-week-dead
stoat had just wafted past his flaring Expressionist nostrils. This is
a creation who can draw laughs by announcing sepulchrally, "And so another
young life is pointlessly snuffed out."

But the crucial ingredient  have I not mentioned this yet?  is that
the show is a musical, a "junk opera" and the perfect vehicle for the perverse,
nightmare-Berlin-cabaret style of The Tiger Lillies trio, led by leering
accordionist and piercing falsetto vocalist Martyn Jacques. These wonderfully
dark stories are told primarily in song (most, though not all, are enacted
to accompany the music), with Jacques shrieking horrifying nursery-rhyme
couplets such as the cats' observation about poor Harriet: "Miaow, mi-oh,
miaow, mi-oh/She's burned to death  we told her so." Jacques's disgusting
relish in rhyming on the word "...dead!" communicates to the audience,
who by the tale of Johnny Head-in-Air are joyously crying out each repetition
along with him. Fidgety Phil's demise is accompanied by drummer Adrian
Huge (yes, really) playing a percussion solo on kitchen utensils.

The sole reservation expressed about the show last year by Alastair
Macaulay  that its opening stages clunk and drag  seems to have been
addressed; it now runs ten to fifteen minutes faster, with the earlier
scenes rounding off more sharply and even Jacques forgoing the occasional
savoured "...dead!" Anyone who has ever strayed even momentarily from the
strictest canons of "good taste" will find it a magical, liberating experience.